I am Nicole Beale (nee Smith), a PhD student at the University of Southampton, looking at the impact that the Web is having on professional practice in the cultural heritage sector. As with every weekday, my morning has begun with some toast, a cup of tea, and my RSS feeds. I have a meeting with my supervisor later today, so I’ll mostly be spending time with my own thoughts this morning, but there’s still time to do a few little fun ‘archaeology’ themed jobs.

Firstly, after I have brushed my teeth I am planning to clean up a blog that I set up for a great project that is run by two insanely motivated archaeologists, between Southampton University and Zupanja Museum in Croatia. The blog is quite dusty and needs a spring-clean before the next load of students begin to populate it with this year’s fieldwork data (they survey/dig through August). The blog aims to give updates about the fieldwork season as it goes on, but invariably has been updated at the end of a season with a few personal thoughts and then a season summary. I’m going to try to encourage more ‘raw’ content this season, but don’t know if those digging and surveying will be able to find time to contribute content.

In an attempt to lessen the frustrations of visiting a blog that doesn’t have regular content updates, I have tried to fashion it more like a static website. Not sure if that does actually make the lack of new content less frustrating for the subscribers, but it certainly does lessen my guilt for not spending much time cleaning it up as I should have last year (or the year before). Time is the biggest barrier I think to the success of communication avenues like the blogs we set up every year. Along with persuading team members that content can be brief and still worthy of inclusion.